The UK’s housing crisis is much like the one in certain American cities — nimbyism, runaway housing prices, political paralysis — but with a British flavor of madness that allows for deeply unpleasant solutions. The local delicacy: car-dependent exurban developments made of uncanny cookie-cutter housing clusters in the middle of nowhere, with no shops, pubs, schools, cafés or public transport, surrounded by highways and austerity.
Jenny Raggett, researcher at Transport for New Homes, said: “We were appalled to find so many new housing developments built around the car with residents driving for almost every journey.
“As those cars head for our towns and cities they clog up existing roads. Commuter times get longer and longer. Car-based living of this kind is not good for our health or quality of life.”
Pictured above is a street view of Prior’s Hall Park, near Corby, a new subdivision surrounded by three industrial parks and apparently inspired by childrens’ drawings of bricked-up Victorian tenements. Welcome to the center of the venn diagram of J.G. Ballard, Minecraft and $6-a-gallon gasoline.